Animals as moral others: Obligation in the context of animal emancipation

This project explores the idea that animals are moral others. The project looks critically at the work of contemporary animal rights philosophers Peter Singer and Thomas Regan in addition to several historical figures whose writings have played important roles in the development of the modern animal rights movement. Specifically, the thesis examines the influence of René Descartes and Charles Darwin on the present structure of animal rights theorizing. Its main intention in this respect is to give evidence of the way in which the modern movement for animal emancipation remains chiefly indebted to what has been called “moral extensionism”, that is, granting animals moral warrant only to the extent that they are regarded as extensions of human beings.

In contradistinction to this conventional view, this paper advances a more radical claim, namely, that animals are moral agents not simply because of the ways in which they are similar to people, but equally because of the ways in which humans and animals differ. In other words, without abnegating entirely the significance of similarity in moral thinking, the paper claims a place for difference in how we should conceptualize moral relations.

This position is argued on the strength of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, whose ideas about moral theory represent a significant challenge to conventional views in philosophy. The project incorporates Levinas's ideas and combines them with concepts derived from philosophical biology in order to show several points of convergence. In so doing, the essay attempts to demonstrate that Levinas's ideas about morality may lend themselves to an interpretation which shows that animals occupy a place in the moral realm.